In the year 2000 I thought of the internet as a huge department store, you could get lost in the banal commercial arena that the world wide web seems at first to be. As I was doing the searching/researching process, I copied and pasted images and text and collaged them together into a narrative. The main character was called mrs L. and the tale reflects the working process, ending with mrs L. and her friend trying, but never quite able, to finish an index.

View Project  –  (you will need to enable pop up windows!)

Error 404 was a commission from e-2 for a project they were doing called Containership where they were asking artists who weren’t net artists. I’d never been on the web before, so the project was partly about a naïve navigation of cyber space and I tried to treat the internet as the real world, a physical space. I started surfing by taking some addresses from the bookmarks on a public library computer, random starting points in cyberspace, and I just let one website lead me to another. I worked with Pete Edwards to compose an animation of all these different fragments to tell this story. The piece is a 20 minute duration ‘composition’, and isn’t interactive; the pop up and moving windows fill up each viewer’s desktop, rendering the viewer more passive than usual. There is a central text that types out the main story letter by letter , and the other images and texts pop onto the screen and move around, seemingly taking over the desktop. I made a diagram/drawing to map out the composition for Pete and that has been shown in Amsterdam. The website was launched at the Lux in London.

Date

2000

Commissioner and venue

Commissioned by e-2
The Lux, London
XXIst Century Female Century, Mediarama New Media Festival, Sevilla, Spain
Borderline, Veemvloer, Amsterdam

Media

Drawing
Website

Funder

Arts Council England New Media Projects Fund

Links

• e-2

Technical Director Peter Edwards
Thanks to Simon Faithfull

• scans of drawing